Another series loss to Milwaukee leaves them languishing, but an opportunity against St. Louis awaits.
The Cincinnati Reds eked out a 4-3 victory over the Milwaukee Brewers on Sunday, salvaging a game out of an already lost series and finally doing some heavy lifting on their abysmal (and NL-worst) 10-21 record in 1-run games. The win keeps them out of the basement in the National League Central, for now, as they sit a half-game ahead of the Pittsburgh Pirates in that duo’s annual battle for cellar supremacy within the division.
FanGraphs now pegs the Reds with a 2.0% chance of making the playoffs, a Dumb and Dumber quote the only thing between them and simply playing out the string. FanGraphs also shows the Reds with the second-worst hard-hit rate in all of Major League Baseball, something that’s surely a driving factor into why their collective 90 wRC+ is better than only the five worst teams in all of baseball record-wise.
It’s a damning indictment, really, and truly one of the more frustrating things to have watched with this franchise over the years. The team’s 13.8 total fWAR from their pitchers ranks as the 4th best in the game, and this is a club that has found ways to score 40 more runs than their opponents over the course of the season. However, the complete loss of Matt McLain and Christian Encarnacion-Strand paired with the repeated absences of TJ Friedl and Noelvi Marte’s collapse has rendered a threadbare offense that simply hasn’t been able to step up often enough to support one of the better pitching staffs in recent memory.
Lest I omit Jeimer Candelario, who FanGraphs (-0.1 fWAR this season) is more kind on than Baseball Reference (-0.5 bWAR) at the moment. He’s hit just .184/.242/.312 over his last 36 G, and we know the defense hasn’t been there, either. His 59 wRC+ since the start of July ranks as the 10th worst among the 169 qualified hitters over that span, though somehow runs laps around Marte’s abysmal 45 mark (4th worst).
This team simply can’t hit efficiently enough, or often enough to keep themselves anywhere other than on the fringe of relevance. They are just 4.5 G out of the final Wild Card spot (still), though they’ll need to leapfrog five teams to make that miracle happen. One of those clubs is the St. Louis Cardinals, however, and that’s precisely who the Reds begin hosting tonight at Great American Ball Park.
Before just about every series for the last two months I have mentioned that it would behoove the Reds to use said series to build momentum and finally, mercifully begin their climb out of the basement of the division. This serves as my latest behoovin suggestion.